No big changes this week

Hi to all...

Numbers are in for the week and they're not showing any significant changes.
Here's what I have:

• Heating and stove oils are up by a paltry 5/100ths of a cent.
• Diesel shows an added 1/10th of a cent, and...
• Gasoline shows up by 4/10ths of a cent a litre.

There's not a lot happening out there this past week.

Or, so they say.

What I do hear is that there's a lot of trepidation over what's NOT being talked about in the markets...

Right now, we're looking at inventory levels that rival the Reagan era, when there was record inventory of distillate as well. If you go back to that era, it was a time when a lot more people were using heating and stove oils, so this is fast becoming a worry to investors in refined product. When it comes to all types of heating sources that are in use, numbers a couple of years ago showed that only nine per cent of homes in the US northeast (PADD 2) used heating or stove oils as their primary source of heat. That is compared to a 29 per cent market share in the mid sixties era.

Since then, heating and stove oils, since 2001 particularly, have increased in price by a rough 275 per cent in some years, and that factor alone has forced people to move away from heating and stove oils as a primary source of heating.

In the US northeast, heating and stove oils have fallen way behind the use of natural gas and electricity as heat sources.

The end is coming for heating oils, but being part of the distillate group of fuels still helps the support of its price. Because it falls within the group, it also blends well as diesel fuel, and that makes it one of the world's predominant fuels of choice today.

That's it for now!

Regards,

George Murphy
Group researcher/Member
Consumer Group for Fair Gas Prices